Democrats will pay for this: Their awful budget gives the GOP perfect political ammo

Gov. Paterson and his fellow Democrats are confirming everyone's worst fears about Albany becoming a one-party town. Instead of demonstrating that they can be fiscally responsible in a crisis, they are acting just like stereotypical, out-of-control, big-government liberals.

They're using their newfound dominance of state government to tax and spend with abandon, shaft the middle class, let criminals out of jail and cozy up to labor.

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Republicans - shut out of the inner circle for the first time since the 1930s - can do little but gnash their teeth on the sidelines. Inside, though, they're chuckling diabolically. They know just how much political dynamite the Democrats are handing them by passing this ridiculously bloated, irresponsible budget.

Cobbled together in unprecedented secrecy, this monstrosity hikes taxes and fees not just on the rich, but on every New Yorker who has health insurance, pays utility bills, drinks wine or beer or buys bottled water.

And it does so not just to close a deficit, but to fuel a whopping 9% increase in spending - about seven times the inflation rate.

The attack ads practically write themselves.

The GOP can point out, truthfully, that Albany Democrats went on a spending binge in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

That they perpetrated the biggest tax increase in state history - adding at least $5 billion, and probably more like $8 billion, to what is already one of the very heaviest state and local tax burdens in the country.

That they canceled school-tax rebates for middle-class homeowners while doing nothing to control spiraling property levies.

That they endangered public safety by letting dealers get out of prison early - and making it harder to lock them up in the first place. No matter what spin you hear from the Dems, that's precisely what the Rockefeller Drug Law reforms they crammed into the budget will really do.

Meanwhile, they did precious little to squeeze the vast amounts of waste and inefficiency out of state government.

The $45 billion Medicaid health plan - which already costs twice the national average per patient - is on track to grow by more than $3 billion, or 7%.

Paterson's proposals to reform costly pensions and health benefits for public employees died on arrival in the Legislature. As did his proposed cap on property tax growth and cost-saving mandate relief for local government.

This is quite a record for the Democrats to carry into next year's election.

And Paterson, after months of shaky, bungling leadership, is notching approval ratings south of 20%. He could hardly be more vulnerable to a challenge, from within his party and without.

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New York may be a deep-blue state, but it's home to a lot of common-sense, middle-of-the-road voters with little patience for knee-jerk Democrat-style government. That's why no Dem has won the mayor's office in New York City since 1989 - and why a Republican was governor from 1995 through 2006.

Paterson has sometimes sounded like that kind of Democrat, talking about Legislature's "addiction" to spending and how high taxes and a weak economy have driven his childhood friends out of the state. Smith, too, has sometimes claimed the mantle of a business-friendly fiscal conservative.

When push came to shove, though, they caved to pressure from the special interests and produced a lazy, business-as-usual budget. And, quite possibly, signed their political death warrants.